While the GUI installer was unable to find the external hard drive, the good old fashioned text installer was able to see the drive fine. Created 3 partitions on the drive, made the first partition bootable and installed root to that partition. For some reason, the installer deemed it unnecessary for me to specify a swap partition, and I installed /home to another partition.

Install flew through with flying colors.. No errors during the installation process. However, when I go to boot to the external drive, I get the splash screen, the hard drive works for a few seconds, then the caps lock key starts flashing and everything grinds to a halt. This is happening with any boot option I select via LILO.

Did I make boo-boo during the partition creating phase of the installation? All I did was make 2 partitions. sdb1 is the boot partition on the external drive and I allocated 50GB for it. The remainding 250GB I allocated to /home (sdb2).

Scratching my head here. It starts the boot process just fine and hangs at that point. **banging head on desk**

This is most likely a kernel issue, but I'm not sure what I need to input as part of the kernel compile during the installation process. Going to play with the install and see if I can figure it out. Will report back in a while.

Yeah... I was too tired last night for things to really sink in, and getting the kernel panic error was just too much to wrap my head around at that stage. Figured I'd attack the issue with a fresh head (and fresh coffee) in the morning. Got up early and thought about it for a bit, and figured out the boot process was too fast for everything to be detected properly. Appended the rootdelay option and everything flew just like it should.

Up to now, I've been a SOHO fanatic. What an idiot I've been. I'm VERY impressed with 6 Standard and now I wish I'd played with the Standard versions much earlier!

One thing I did run across during the installation. The GUI Installer just flat refused to detect the USB drive, so I had to revert back to the good ol' text installation. Don't know why I could get it detected in text mode but not with the GUI. Go figure...